04/04/2025
I find that I mostly agree with this sentiment. It's certainly worth a read.
The War of Opinions: Why the Hoof World Will Never Agree
The traditional hoof care world is locked in a never-ending battle of opinions.
Angles, alignments, heel heights, toe lengths - they argue relentlessly, all in pursuit of the “ideal” hoof.
But they will never, ever find resolution.
Why? Because they refuse to follow the one true reference point available to all: the natural foot.
How can any hoof care professional, vet, or researcher claim authority on hoof function when they spend their lives altering and interfering with a foot that was already perfectly engineered?
A foot that comes with its own internal blueprint - its own set of non-negotiable anatomical constants - yet is rarely, if ever, honoured.
The natural foot is not random. It is astonishingly consistent across sound, healthy horses.
The dorsal angle of P3, the slope of the coronary band, the relationship of P3 to the frog, the alignment of joints, the position of soft tissues - these constants repeat, with only minor variation between breeds.
They are not up for debate. They are not subjective. They are biological facts.
But tradition doesn’t want facts. It wants control. It wants opinions dressed up as science.
So it wedges heels, cuts toes, and reshapes hooves to fit theories - never the horse.
The moment they defend these distortions, they reveal their hand: they are no longer working with a natural foot. They’re working with a foot altered by belief systems, not by biology.
And this is the great irony: the more they fight to prove their point, the more they reveal how far they’ve strayed from the truth.
You cannot base your conclusions on a hoof that’s been pathologically changed and expect to find a universal truth.
You can’t say, “We’ve never seen a ground-parallel P3 on loading,” if you’ve never let a hoof grow into its natural alignment in the first place.
You can’t claim that a flat landing is dysfunctional when you’ve created a foot that never had the chance to land any other way than unnaturally.
They dismiss the hard sole plane - the one constant the hoof offers up with clarity - as insignificant because it doesn’t fit with their narrative, and therefore, reputation.
They leave heels high, toes chopped, walls distorted.
And then they ask why the horse is lame.
The real question is: how long do we continue to let humans rewrite a blueprint they never authored?
The hoof, when left to grow and function according to its design, is not weak. It is not unstable. It is not broken.
The pathology arrives when the blueprint is ignored, edited, and redefined to fit trends and egos.
And because each school of thought builds on a distorted foundation, consensus is utterly impossible.
They will never agree - not because the truth is elusive, but because no one is willing to lay down their ego and simply listen to the hoof.
Only those of us who choose to observe the foot without trying to dominate it - those who respect its original form and function - can truly appreciate its power.
Only we can witness what long-term soundness really looks like. And only we understand that healing doesn’t come from intervention - it comes from restraint.
So keep arguing. Keep drawing angles on manipulated hooves. Keep justifying your methods with opinions dressed as science.
Just know this: you’ll never agree, because none of you are using the same starting point.
You’re all debating distorted hooves - and in doing so, you’ve lost sight of the one thing that could’ve aligned you all: the natural foot.
HM.
